Refuting the Common Campus Lies Told About Israel

The "Big Lie" on Steroids

[Check out my new novel, Bright College Years, about what colleges used to be like before they all went crazy …]

Introduction

In a forthcoming long piece, of which I excerpt the first section here, I examine some of the major lies told about Israel on campuses and elsewhere. I’ll not only refute each one but show that in most cases (1) Israel in fact does nearly the opposite of what is being charged, and (2) it’s actually Israel’s enemies that are guilty of the charges. The lies will be familiar to anyone familiar with the campus scene. That they are so many, and that they are so “big,” and so widespread, shows that the phenomenon isn’t just about misinformation or ignorance or “inadequate nuance for a complex situation,” nor is it a matter of ordinary critique of Israeli policies or practices. To the contrary it is a deliberate bad faith campaign to dehumanize, delegitimize, and demonize, to portray Israel and Jews as the epitome of evil, as genuine monsters—which then justifies the many actions taken against them on campus and elsewhere, including boycotting, persecuting, physically attacking, and even killing them, as the campus celebratory response to October 7 demonstrates.

If this sort of strategy sounds familiar, it should, for it goes by the name, “The Big Lie,” and has a very well known proponent:

     All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

     It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

                                    --Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf I.10[1]

As the famous quote attributed to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels similarly puts it,[2]

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

                        --attributed to Joseph Goebbels

The Goebbels quote at least yields the optimistic thought that the truth can set people free, by helping them escape from the Big Lie—though unfortunately the track record might rather support the Hitler view, where the Big Lie, even if refuted, still “leaves traces behind it,” where people once gripped by the Big Lie will tend even to resist the truth. In this age of social media, where fake news is nearly impossible to distinguish from real and where most people seem to have neither the time nor inclination to care, the Big Lie has the capacity to become (and does, with respect to Israel and the Jews) the Enormous Lie that conquers and occupies the cognitive apparatus never to be dislodged.

It may be impossible to counter the phenomenon, in other words.

But we must do our best.

The False Narrative

Most of the lies about Israel fit into a single package we’ll call the “False Narrative.”

There once was a country called Palestine, existing from time immemorial, ruled by the Palestinians and home to a few Jews with whom they got along nicely. Then the Zionist Jews began arriving from Europe in the 20^th century, starting an ongoing “genocide” against Palestinians and expelling hundreds of thousands (“ethnic cleansing”) as part of their project of “settler-colonialism,” thus coming to “occupy” Palestinian land (in 1948 and in 1967) and building “illegal settlements.” Palestinians who remained in Israel (and their descendants) are kept subjugated under “apartheid,” a political system that reflects and maintains “Jewish supremacy.” Those who were expelled to the “West Bank” now live under that crippling occupation, while those who were expelled to Gaza are kept in an “open air prison.” All of the above shows that “Zionism is racism,” and so “resistance” to Zionism “by any means necessary” is entirely justified, including the rapes, torture, and massacre of October 7.

This is essentially the narrative that is being disseminated everywhere, on campuses through classes, lectures, rallies, and through work in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracy, in secondary schools and even elementary schools, in graduate programs, through mainstream media and through social media, literally everywhere. It is on the basis of this narrative that our campuses have become so hostile to Israel, to Zionism, and therefore to Jews, and were able to see the barbaric October 7 massacre not as an atrocity but as a “liberating resistance” worthy of celebrating and even repeating.

Yet you could not fit more Big Lies into a single paragraph.

We shall address them in turn.

Big Lie 1: “There once was a country called Palestine, existing from time immemorial, ruled by the Palestinians and home to a few Jews with whom they got along nicely.”

In short—no.

Let’s start with the name “Palestine” itself.[3] There are two main theories about its origin. The first is that it derives from the Biblical Hebrew word (p’lishtin) that means “invaders” and refers to the Philistines, a Biblical era people who invaded the Land of Israel from the Aegean Sea. The other, noting that the term first appears outside the Biblical context in a Greek history text dated several centuries BCE, is that it derives from the Greek word for “wrestlers.”[4] If you wonder why ancient Greeks would name that region after “wrestlers,” consider that (1) the Jews referred to themselves collectively as “Israel,” (2) they referred to their land as “the Land of Israel,” and (3) “Israel” in Biblical Hebrew means “wrestled with God.” Either way, the name “Palestine” appears to be connected to Jews, rather odd on the claim that it names the ancient homeland of the Palestinian Arabs. Would they name their own country by a Hebrew name or by the Greek name for the Jews?

For those who know the history, the Israelites/Jews had either sovereignty, autonomy, or a dominant presence in that land from about 1200 BCE (the approximate date of the Exodus from Egypt, if that is a historical event) through at least the year 70 CE, when the Romans defeated the country of “Judea” (also named for the Jews, or Judaites), destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and sent many Jews into exile.[5] On finally conquering the Jews for good after the Bar Kochba revolt, in 136 CE, the Romans then gave Judea the new name of “Syria Palestina,” allegedly a humiliating gesture to nullify the then 1400-year Jewish history in the land by renaming it after those now long disappeared invaders, the Philistines. From that point onward “Palestine” became a largely European name for the region, not widely used by Arabs or other Middle Easterners, many of whom referred to the region as Southern Syria. Nor from that point on was there ever an independent country called “Palestine,” much less one ruled by the Arab people known today as “Palestinians.” Nor, then, was it the case that immigrating Jews arrived in this “pre-existing Arab country” and took it over, as the False Narrative would have one believe.

Indeed there was not even a clearly defined region, with determinate borders, known as “Palestine” under the Ottoman Empire. The region was divided into at least two distinct provinces, the northern half of the country being part of a province stretching north of today’s Lebanon into Syria and administered from Damascus—hence “Southern Syria”—while the southern half was an entirely distinct administrative unit. “Palestine” only came into being as a distinct entity with well defined borders with the British Mandate in 1920, but most Arabs in the region rejected both the name and the borders, seeing them as a colonialist imposition or invention. When anti-Israelists refer to “historic Palestine,” then, it’s not at all clear what they are referring to; there is nothing corresponding to it “from time immemorial,” so they can at best be referring to 1920 British Mandate Palestine—territory that not only initially included the enormous eastern territory to be called “Transjordan” (and later just “Jordan”), but which the Arabs themselves rejected both in name and in borders—another odd thing to do if “Palestine” is your ancestral homeland.

As for the Palestinian identity, though there were traces of the use of the term early in the twentieth century, few identified as “Palestinian” in the sense of “Palestinian Arab” until perhaps the 1950s. In fact the region had much immigration in the 19^th century from all areas of the Ottoman empire and beyond and consisted of a wide mix of different people, Arabs and non-Arabs. Joan Peters’ well known book, From Time Immemorial, documents the 19^th-century immigration of “Circassians, Algerians, Egyptians, Druses, Turks, Kurds, Bosnians, and others” (p. 196);[8] another widely cited source documents that today’s “Palestinians” are immigrants from many nations: “Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, Tartars, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians, Copts, Maronites, and many others.”[9] Similarly, Daniel Pipes writes:

The authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, written by Irish archeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, lists no less than 23 ethnicities under the "Palestine" entry: Afghan, Algerian, Armenian, Assyrian, Bedouin, Bosnian, Canaanite, Circassian, Crusader, Egyptian, German, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Kurd, Motawila, Nowar, Persian, Roman, Samaritan, Sudanese, Turkish, and Turkoman. Long as this list is, Macalister missed a number of ethnicities (including the Arabian, Chechen, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Yemeni). He further found that "no less than 50 languages [were] spoken in Jerusalem as vernaculars."[10]

Palestinian last names often indicate their family’s heritage: al-Masri (the Egyptian,), al-Djazair (the Algerian), el-Mughrabi (the Moroccan), al-Kurdi (the Kurd), and so on. There was no sense of their being a “single people” or an “ethnic identity” before the twentieth century, and arguably the identity really only arose in response to the onset of modern political Zionism, particularly after the disastrous failed war they launched against the Jews in 1948. But if the identity only arose in response to Zionism, it’s simply false to say that Jewish immigration was to a previously existing country called “Palestine” populated by “Palestinians”—for there simply was no such country and no such people.

And if it wasn’t populated by “Palestinians” it surely was never “ruled by” Palestinians, you mean “Palestinian Arabs.” The Ottoman Turks had sovereignty for 400 years, then the British from 1920 until 1948, then—the Jews. Indeed for many the word “Palestine” during the Mandate period was primarily associated with the Jews of the Mandate, who created many important institutions—such as the Palestine Post (later the Jerusalem Post) and the Palestine Electric Company (later the Israel Electric Company)—and were widely referred to as “Palestinians.” Palestine did not belong to the “Palestinians,” in other words, as that word is used today, and never did, at least not until some region of it was granted to their authority in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

As for the “getting along nicely,” there isn’t space for the long history of Jews under Islamic rule. We note simply that, while, in general, Jews did better through the centuries under Muslims than under Christians and there were some periods of flourishing, they still lived largely as a despised, persecuted and formally second-class minority through the centuries leading up to the 19^th, subject to periodic (and overall numerous) episodes of violence, pogroms, etc., including episodes of mass murder. A short list, just from the long 19^th century onward, includes episodes in Libya in 1785 (where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews), Algiers (where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830), and Marrakesh, Morocco (where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880). As the Jewish Virtual Library puts it, [11]

The situation of Jews in Arab lands reached a low point in the 19th century. Jews in most of North Africa (including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco) were forced to live in ghettos. In Morocco, which contained the largest Jewish community in the Islamic Diaspora, Jews were made to walk barefoot or wear shoes of straw when outside the ghetto. Even Muslim children participated in the degradation of Jews, by throwing stones at them or harassing them in other ways. The frequency of anti-Jewish violence increased, and many Jews were executed on charges of apostasy. Ritual murder accusations against the Jews became commonplace in the Ottoman Empire.

As distinguished Orientalist G.E. von Grunebaum has written … “It would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms.”[12]

Turning specifically to Ottoman Palestine in the 19^th century, Georges Bensoussan writes, in a recent article, of the general state of things,

In Jerusalem, as is often the case in the Arab-Muslim area, the Jewish condition was marked by a climate of humiliation and widespread fear, as witnessed in the nineteenth century by the Jewish traveler Abraham Yaari in his book Voyages en Eretz-Israel: “The Arabs are violently hostile to the Jews, and persecute the children of Israel in the streets of the city. If a notable or even lower-class citizen lays their hands on a Jew, we have no right to reciprocate, whether Arabs or Turks, for they are of the same religion. If a Jew is hit, he must adopt a supplicant attitude and not retaliate with unkind words, lest he receive even more blows…”[13]

Bensoussan then goes on to document several massacres, including major ones in 1834 and 1838.[14]

Finally, the Wikipedia article, “Antisemitism in the Arab World,” also documents the 19^th-century spread of the classic antisemitic “blood libel” throughout the Middle East and North Africa.[15] Though there are variants, the “blood libel” is the allegation that Jews murder non-Jewish children and use their blood for ritual purposes. Wherever that libel spread, violence against local Jews often followed.[16]

If all the above, then, counts as “getting along nicely,” then one shudders to think what not getting along nicely would look like.

Thus the Truth: There was never an independent country called “Palestine” ruled by the people known today as “Palestinians.” Those people in fact were a broad mixture of immigrants from many different places who didn’t develop the “Palestinian” identity until well into the 20^th century. To the contrary the land was named by or for the Jews, was long associated with and inhabited by the Jews, and those Jews who lived as a minority there before Zionism were generally treated as second-class citizens subject to persecution and violence.

Some resources

Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (Chicago: JKAP, 1984).

William B. Ziff, The Rape of Palestine (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938).

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

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[1] From the James Murphy translation, cited here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie.

[2] It’s not clear that Goebbels actually said this, but even if he did not it still illustrates the point; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie.

[3] A good general discussion may be found at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/origin-of-quot-palestine-quot.

[4] https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/when-palestine-meant-israel/.

[5] Many, but not all: many Jews remained behind, as we’ll see, and Jews have maintained a continuous presence in that land until today.

[6] From https://zionism-israel.com/maps/Ottoman_Palestine_1860.htm.

[7] From https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-british-mandate-1921-1923.

[8] Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (JKAP, 1984).

[9] Jacob De Hass, History of Palestine, the Last Two Thousand Years (New York, 1934), p. 258.

[10] https://www.meforum.org/65936/muslim-aliyah?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ef80b11dc2-MEFpr_06122024&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ef80b11dc2-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&goal=0_086cfd423c-ef80b11dc2-33977957&mc_cid=ef80b11dc2&mc_eid=25a0c600c4.

[11] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-treatment-of-jews-in-arab-islamic-countries.

[12] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-treatment-of-jews-in-arab-islamic-countries.

[13] https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-before-the-creation-of-the-state-of-israel-1830-1948/.

[14] See the following site for a list of some five dozen incidents of ethnic cleansing, pogroms, and mass murders perpetrated by Muslim Arabs against Jews, in Palestine and other regions of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, in the 19^th century alone: https://medium.com/@Ksantini/the-list-of-crimes-committed-by-muslims-against-jews-since-the-7th-century-0ff1a8eb0ad0. I’m not able to confirm all of those incidents and every detail reported, except to say that many are quite well known, the list includes the episodes I just mentioned in the main text, and the list is generally plausible.

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world.

[16] The 1840 Damascus case on the list mentioned in the note above became internationally famous, in fact, not least because the allegedly “civilized” French officials present in Damascus participated in and permitted the spread of the libel and possibly the consequent violence as well.